Review: Dorothy Must Die

But when your whole life gets swept up by a tornado – taking you with it – you have no choice but to go along, you know?

Sure, I’ve read the books. I’ve seen the movies. I know the song about the rainbow and the happy little bluebirds. But I never expected Oz to look like this. To be a place where Good Witches can’t be trusted, Wicked Witches may just be the good guys, and winged monkeys can be executed for acts of rebellion. There’s still a yellow brick road – but even that’s crumbling.

What happened? Dorothy.

They say she found a way to come back to Oz. They say she seized power and the power went to her head. And now no one is safe.

My name is Amy Gumm – and I’m the other girl from Kansas.

I’ve been recruited by the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked.

I’ve been trained to fight.

And I have a mission.

This book was not what I expected, and I really liked it for that. It was so much darker than I was ready for, though with a title like that I guess I should have known better right? Well, I was still surprised, for a YA book it was a lot more twisted, gory, and in your face than I had anticipated. People were dying left and right!

The MC was really great though. I loved how tough she was, while still showing the uncertainties that come with growing up and learning to trust yourself. She was also so real, she didn’t pretend to be anything that she wasn’t and she had relatively realistic reactions to the situations she was involved in.

What really kept me from all out loving this book though was the progression. I felt the first 100 pages or so were a bit slow, dedicated to world building, introducing minor characters that you either wouldn’t see again or wouldn’t see again for a while, and generally just giving a ton of examples why Oz was so screwed up now. Then we get to the training to become a bad-ass assassin part of the book, and that was all of like 20 pages (it was longer, but that’s what it felt like to me), there was very little explanation about the magic she learned to use, and she becomes this world class fighter in all of about 6 weeks, I don’t buy that.

I did like the ending though, it added so many more layers to this story and how nothing is what it seems, and who do you trust, and how do you act when the people you trust aren’t completely honest or open with you? It’s incredibly intricate while still being a cohesive story with depth and an easy to follow chain of events with a great main character who I think is going to be able to carry this series through a lot of turmoil.